The Fearful Void - Part 4
"Well, my dear, you have put us in quite a mess. A pickle, if you will. Not just one pickle, in fact. An entire jar of pickles. And perhaps some nice rolls, and a cold side of luncheon meat, and a measure of wine."
Louise stared at the headmaster in confusion. "Sir," she said, for lack of anything else to say. The headmaster's secretary leaned over, and whispered something in his ear.
"Oh, sorry, I've missed lunch because of this," the old man said, a grumpy note in his voice. "I got distracted." He coughed. "Mmm. Yes. Now, yes. We have... through dark and arcane arts, confirmed that the girl you summoned is neither vampire nor transformed dragon nor even an elf..."
"... she doesn't have pointy ears," Miss Chevreuse, one of the earth mage teachers said gnomishly.
The headmaster shot her a disgusted look, and continued, "... and that, through our exhaustive and definitive lists confirm that she is, all things considered, in the balance of probabilities, most likely, maybe, possibly a mage."
"I understand," Louise said. She could not deny that there was something a little hollow in her voice, and she glanced down at Alma, who... was hiding behind her back, face pressed against her mantle. "I think she's shy," the girl said.
Professor Colbert pursed his lips.
"Indeed," Headmaster Osmond said, "And for that reason, clearly, it would be a bad idea to bind her as a familiar. As a foreign noble, it is our duty to treat her well, until we can make contact with her people."
"Yes," Louise said.
"In time," Headmaster Osmond said, "well, I've already talked to the staff, and they will assign a maid to you, to help with the care and look after the child when you are in lessons. But that will take some time, and Professor Colbert has kindly offered to vet the help so that, don't you know, they're suitable to look after a possibly-noble little girl and so on and so forth, so for today, you should look after her. Keep her entertained and whatnot. Shouldn't be too hard, right? I do believe you're a youngest sister, so just act like one of your big sisters did to you, right? Show her the wonders of the school, you know, the library, the gardens, that sort of thing."
"How am I meant to look after a little girl?" was the question Louise wanted to ask. She was sixteen, and... well, most children who went near her hadn't liked her, when she had been seven herself. And the advice was less than useful.
Well, that wasn't quite true, she had to admit to herself. Alma seemed to love the gardens. Even in the rain-sodden landscape, she was apparently happy to lie on the grass, and just... do things. That was the only way Louise could describe it. Within not too long, the little girl had acquired even more mud-stains.
When she discovered the swing that someone had hung in one of the kitchen gardens, it took Louise almost an hour to move her on from there.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. At least she was easy to entertain, it seemed.
...
They ate away from the other students in the main hall; the teachers felt it was best to not expose the new arrival to a mess of inquisitive and hungry teenagers all at once. Both Louise and Alma were ravenous, and after gorging on partridge, the older girl decided that it was probably best to head in a bedwards direction. She was tired herself, and she was fairly sure that small children needed more sleep.
Her room really was not set up to have another staying there, Louise realised very quickly. She had been preparing for a familiar, and so there was fresh straw and fresh hay - the latter in case the beast had been a herbivore. None of that was right for a little girl.
"I think you'll have to sleep in my bed," she told the little girl. She smiled, feeling weary and hoping that it did not show. "I hope you don't snore."
The blank face stared back at her, and Louise pursed her lips, looking around the room. It was bare compared to the rooms of her peers, and she had been very careful to move everything she could move away from her bed, to make a safe zone for when her nightmares spilled over into the real world and magic shook the furniture. There were no wall-hangings, no free-standing things, and last year she had the school get an earth mage to make dimples in the stone floor which served to stop the bed sliding.
"I honestly don't know what to say to you about this, Alma," she said, with a shrug. "You don't understand me, and I don't think I can pantomime the gestures to you or anything. Strange things might happen in the night, and... um, I'll try to stop them as best I can, but..." she spread her hands wide.
The little girl looked around. In her soft, yet slightly guttural voice, she said something back, making gestures with her hands. She clutched her head, and made whooshing noises.
"I don't understand," was all Louise could manage in response. Her eyes widened. "Oh," she said, quickly. "Um. Do you need the chamberpot? The chamberpot?" Looking around, she recovered it from its place - it wasn't safe for her to keep it under the bed. "Do you need this?"
The little girl stared back at her, and reaching out, took her hand. Louise's eyebrow twitched, and a headache grew, right behind her left eyeball - with her free hand, she pushed the back of her hand against her screwed-shut eye, teeth clenched. The pain stopped, as the girl let go, clutching her own head, her motions of pain and discomfort exactly the same Louise was showing. She whispered something in her strange language, a look of confusion in those yellow-red eyes.
"What... was that?" Louise managed. "That... the headache."
A mutter of explanation, in which the phrase "loo-ays" appeared three times.
"I'm going to have to think about this," Louise said to herself, slumping down on her bed. Pausing, she sat back up, and went over to a chest in the far corner. Flicking open the catches, she frowned. She had meant to get more ice today, hadn't she, because she'd been busy yesterday and... oh well. She recovered two of the waterskins from the ice-melt, and bought them over.
"I don't know if you get headaches like I do normally," she explained, "but the cold makes them feel better." She rested the cold against her forehead, and sighed. "Like that, see?"
The girl took the other one, and copied the gesture, with a faint squeak at the chill. Suspiciously, she glared at the water-sack, before putting it against her eye.
"Look," Louise said, after a while, sizing up the mud and grass-smeared gown-smock Alma was wearing, "... you can wear one of my spare nightgowns tonight. We can see about getting you some proper clothes tomorrow, because that thing is dirty." Thankfully, she began to shed her uniform. Wouldn't this be embarrassing if this had been a boy she had summoned? Although those red-yellow eyes - noble eyes, commoners didn't look like that - were rather disconcerting, and the pink-haired girl didn't feel up to the pantomime of explaining 'can you please not look at me when I get changed' to a little girl possibly too young to know what she should be doing. Certainly, Alma shed her clothes easily enough when Louise managed, through demonstration and presentation of a second nightgown, to convey that she should get changed too.
She was not wearing anything under that incredibly thin gown, and so it was that Louise could see the markings. Fingernail scratches along her arms and wrists, close to the skin and scabbed over. Bruising on her shoulders; clear prints from large, adult hands grabbing her. The same on her ankles. Little... bites, they had to be... on veins. And she was on the thin side of things - not quite malnourished, but not exactly healthy either - with not enough of the baby fat which Louise had possessed at the same age.
It drew a sharp intake breath from Louise, as she stared too. Unconsciously, her fingers drifted to her own wrists, hugging the skin underneath. Those were self-inflicted marks, she knew for a fact. For lack of anything else to do, the pink-haired girl massaged her own temples with two fingers while she thought.
She blinked, and stood again, rummaging through her chest of draws for the medicinal box she was permitted to have. Louise opened the top section with the whispered pass-code, and recovered a jar of greenish-yellow cutsbalm. "It's medicine," she explained, voice soft and low, "alchemy, with infused water magic. Please, I can help." She swallowed. "I... I don't know what's happened to you before," she said, "but... those look painful. Alma. Please." She advanced, unscrewing the cap. "I know how much scratches like that can hurt, and bruises and..." she swallowed hard, as the little girl hunched up again. She'd seen the girl do it before, and now she had context.
This small girl was scared of being hit or grabbed. From the bruises on her shoulders, it looked like whoever did it was... and another piece clicked into place in Louise's head. When Cattleya went into convulsions, when people had to hold her down... the bruises on the shoulders and legs which that left looked like that. Someone had held her down, forcefully.
The pink-haired girl slumped down heavily. "I'm going to have to write home to Mother," she said, simply. "I... I can't deal with this. I... I was just meant to get a familiar today. Some animal I could have follow me. Not... not this. Not a little girl. Not one who... who gives me headaches and who gets headaches from me. Not one who doesn't speak any Tristainian."
Alma stared blankly back at her, still cringing, whispering something inaudible.
"I... I don't know if you're just sick from something, or if someone has beaten you and things," Louise continued, "but... ah." Carefully, she put the cutsbalm down on the floor before the girl, and took a step back. "You rub in onto things that hurt," she explained, miming scooping some up and putting it on her own shoulder. "It makes things not hurt. Feel better."
A bit more prompting and encouragement was enough to get Alma to at least try the cutsbalm, and the little girl squeaked at the chill feeling of the balm sinking into the bruises on her shoulders.
"Wrists too," Louise prompted, gesturing. "It stops scars, and also infections. Even if you put it on scabs, it makes things heal properly. It's
wonderful, because it also makes things not hurt."
A musketfire barrage of words in Alma's language, and a hesitant, wobbly smile from the girl. "Grain," the girl tried after a moment's thought, pointing at her still-bare shoulder. "Grain-raad," she said, with a shake of her head. Indeed, the bruise colour was fading already, the inflammation already gone.
"Yes," Louise managed, her voice choking slightly. After a moment's pause, she coughed. "And we can now try to put your nightgown on properly. Well, my nightgown. Nightgown," she said, pointing at the clothing. "Put on the nightgown."
"Puton nitegaan?"
"Yes, yes!" Louise mimed. "And then we can go to sleep." She closed her eyes. "Sleep," she said, breathing, resting her head on her hands. "Sleep?"
The nightgown was as she had guessed, far far too large for the little girl, but at least the now-fading bruises and cuts were no longer visible. The pink-haired girl suppressed a slight giggle at the serious-faced little girl with the neck of the garment reaching down to her breastbone and arms that were not so much arms as legs, and climbed up onto her bed.
"At least we're both small, so there's space in the bed for both of us," Louise explained, shaking her head at her own silliness. "I may well go crazy with only you to talk to like this, so I might as well get you able to talk back," she informed Alma. "Bed. This is a bed. This bed is where you sleep. Sleep in the bed."
"Sleep baad?"
Louise shuffled under the sheets as the small child clambered up in her too-large nightgown. "I hope not," she said, mind distracted. "I hope I sleep well tonight."
